Faster Payments outage cause still unknown, as companies asses damage

Thursday 12 July 2018 | 10:01 AM
CET

A few days after UK’s online banking system suffered a four-hour outage, companies are still chasing transactions made through Faster Payments System.

As first reported by Computer Business Review, on Sunday, 8th of July 2018, around 13:00, the core infrastructure of Mastercard company Vocalink suffered a mystery outage that lasted until 17:30, with an estimated 769,480 payments delayed.

Two days later, Faster Payments was still working manually through the issue – and Vocalink has yet to identify the cause, according to a Faster Payments spokesman speaking to Computer Business Review on Tuesday, 10th of July 2018.

Faster Payments officials stated that they were aware of Vocalink’s central infrastructure, and not an issue with the bank gateways. They had no indication it was caused by an external actor at that point, but Faster Payments refrained from making any official statements before receiving a full report from Vocalink. Right now the priority is manually identifying the as-yet unmade payments, the company added.

The figure is an estimate based on the payments processed during the same time on Sunday 13th of May 2018. Neither party appears to know yet how many payments were delayed or how many have yet to be processed, but they estimate it to be in the region of one percent of the payments typically made in a four-and-a-half hour window on a Sunday afternoon: around GBP 750,000.